How’s the whole SDMB business model thing going since we went to subscriptions? Is it failing or succeeding? I haven’t seen much in the way of any “State of the Board” messages from Cecil or staff. It’s all just kind of a stealthy, submarine like quiet. You can barely hear a ping.
What’s happening?
Shhh…they’re counting our money.
Not a complete answer, but you might want to check out Ed Zotti’s observation in this thread (along with his further comment two posts later). I believe that there will be something similar to a Board in Review message in the next month or so (provided I understand my staff mail correctly nd have not garbled that message).
We’ve asked Ed to reply to you. We admins/mods don’t know the finances aside from what the Reader tells us.
Thanks!
I’ll have more to say when we open our annual subscription drive, which is tentatively planned to start at the end of the month. For now I can tell you that things are going OK. We’ve got ~4,500 subscribers, which is a healthy number, and traffic is excellent (perhaps a little too excellent, since we’ve run out of server again). Moving the server offsite, which happened last August, reduced headaches for our IT staff. We’re still not making money, but the board isn’t the financial black hole it used to be and we’ve established to our satisfaction that the subscription model will fly. We’re thinking about making another run at some ad dollars - Internet ad spending is growing at a good clip. In short, we think we’re starting to get this online thing figured out. About frigging time.
I’m way ahead of you, Mr. Zotti. Hope that helped.
How many have re-upped already?
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Are you saying we will not only have to pay to post (which I have no problem with) but we will also have to view ads? Or are you going to only have ads broadcast to non-paying guests?
With the number of books that are recommended by supplying an amazon link, are we getting any click-through fees when sales are made? Just a thought.
Does that mean we’ll only have threads about The Three Tenors, Andre Rieu, and an “Are You Being Served” retrospective? :eek:
Just out of curiosity, in the nearly one year after the initial drive for charter members at half price has closed, how many full-price subscribers have we obtained. I see quite a few new faces with recent registration dates and “charter member” under their names, but I’m interested in how many paid new subscribers we have pulled in since going to the pay model.
Assuming you mean subscribers who paid $14.95, about 750.
Please-oh-please-oh-please- read some of the rants and problems dudes here have had with Snopes. Snopes is a wonderful site, but they allow “pop-ups” “pop-unders” (some of which are prgrammed to get past "pop-up blockers’) and many of their ads are for rather disreputable sites and offers. Some of their advertisers have loaded Spyware onto their ads- I got hit once from there myself. Some claim to offer “services” but are really Spyware loaders. Those are some of the “bottom feeders” in the world of Internet advertising
Advertising is Ok, but don’t allow the SD to sell out to dudes who are pushing the opposite of the “Straight Dope”. If there are ads, make sure they are not any of the sorts which cause headaches and cancelations.
More than anything else- if I came to the SDMB and got “pop-ups” - especially those for "spyware blockers’ that really load Spyware onto ones computer :mad: - I’d leave and not re-up.
yah. I wouldn’t mind advertising so long as only people who didn’t subscribe saw them. but if I pay AND have to look at ads. well, that’d be just like paying for cable television and having to watch advertisements anyway, which is precisely why I don’t own a TV.
Thanks, Ed. That’s a pretty healthy number, particularly considering the nay-sayers who said that nobody new would sign up.
Might I add, by the way, that this particular naysayer is very glad to have been wrong.
I hear you. We’re all a little concerned about getting ads that will junk up the site. No way do we want (well, no way do I want) popups and popunders. I’m thinking simple ad banners as on the SD home page, which you can easily scroll off. However, we’ve just started looking into this and don’t know what’s out there, so we’ll have to defer discussion until we get some more information.
Is there some point at which new members will simply be “Members” rather than “Charter Members?”
How about Google Adwords, rather than banners? Unless you want to deal with the headaches of managing banners yourself, including rotation and the like, you’re probably going to be dealing with an advertising provider, which means that the content of the ads would be out of your control. Adwords are are far less intrusive and malware-laden.
And how about an option for me to pay to eliminate ads? I’d happily pay extra for an ad-free version of the SDMB.